ABC's of Being in Your Mid-Twenties: A 26 Part Series

B – is for Bands.

B – is for Bros.

Growing up in the Midwest, there are very few things with which I can culturally identify, and this becomes even less so considering my hometown neighborhoods, the sprawling suburbs of the north central/west part of Illinois. Soccer, baseball, band and orchestra practice – these are but a few of the mundane, though specifically identifying characteristics of the youth of my childhood. Rightfully so, we were happy, perhaps because we knew no different or probably more precisely, we didn’t want anything different. We were blissfully acceptant of sitting in the backseat of the car being driven by our mothers to soccer and then band and then karate in one evening, having barely enough time between commutes to enjoy a haplessly made turkey sandwich without mustard. (not that I disliked mustard, quite the opposite. However in the flurry of getting prepared for her nightly chauffeuring duties, she oft forgot the mustard.)

Between activities, my brothers and I spent many hours in the back of our Toyota 4-runner either A.) slapping each other and stealing each others fruit snacks or B.) singing along with the country music that my mother insisted on playing during our nightly voyages. Throughout the greater part of the 90’s and the early 2000’s, my music vocabulary was limited to whatever artist was being featured on US 99.5, Chicagoland’s home of contemporary country music. It was with this involuntary immersion that first spawned my loathing, and then greater appreciation for, country music.

Needless to say, when I entered middle school, country music was not only not cool by traditional standards, it was virtually unheard of by my peers, and I was further ostracized by my (then) love for Shania and Garth and Alabama. Desperate to make friends or at least keep my fellow students from picking on me, I began to search for what one would consider “cool” music, or rather music that was acceptable by the greater masses. It was during this period of time that I had a friend introduce me to a small band out of San Diego called Blink 182 and it was all downhill from there. I couldn’t get enough of this new kind of music: to think that there was music out there that wasn’t about heartbreak or beer or dogs/trucks/fishing was a new phenomenon.

During high school my father reintroduced me to classic rock, bands like Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Elton John and The Who. (I say reintroduced because there was a short amount of time in my wee youth that he tried to get me to like this kind of music but I wistfully rejected the thought, mostly because I had no clue. No clue at all.) I was also surrounded by friends who were not only way more into music than I at that time, but who were also willing to teach me the way to find new bands and enjoy music for the sake of music. Bands were now a way of life, moreover the music they played shaped my mood, my very outlook on life on any given day. And it can all be traced back to Mark, Tom, and Travis (or Scott, depending on which album you’re discussing). Many people talk about the first time they heard the Beatles; for me, it was Blink 182.

In hindsight, my overindulgence in music has become a beast on my back that I have since been unable to shake. My excitement about new music and new artists is not as extreme as it could be, but it’s certainly more out of control than the average Joe. I no longer want to just have the newest single; I want the artists discography, their influences, their influences discography, etc. the cycle is endless. It’s because of this I was simultaneously listening to Elvis and Elliot Smith and Coldplay in one day. This greater understanding of my new found music catalogue was a catalyst for creative output for me as well as many like minded high schoolers, which proved problematic at school dances and other social gatherings at which the mass amount of people not only requested stereotypically “popular” music, but further bothered us with their lack of understand of how Chris Brown’s music was influenced by the likes of Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and ultimately, the blues genre in general.

This became less important when we all graduated high school and went to college. Sure, our music came with us, and at our universities we bonded with those who had similar music tastes, debating whether or not the digital remaster of “Sticky Fingers” was as good as the original mono vinyl, or whether or not Phil Ochs entire music library was worth owning. The larger issue at hand for me upon entering college, however, were the Bros.

If we look up the word “bro,” traditional definition would say that bro is shorthand for the word brother, a fraternal relative. However current parlance has a broader definition. After several years sitting on the quad in observation, I can say that a bro is both simple and infinitely difficult to understand. Some bros are super into sports and slap each other on the ass way too frequently. Some bros wear boat shoes, pink shorts, and blue oxford shirts with backwards baseball hats and study law by day and “school bitches in beer pong” by night. Some bros are way too into Halo and Call of Duty. Some bros are actually quite dumb and spend their days shuffling between the gym and Quiznos. Oddly enough, given the vast variety of bros that attended our tiny division 3 school (and I assume all universities, minus the exclusively female ones) there really is only one thing that unites them as a group, or really a sub phylum of greater manhood, that of course being their affection and utter love of beer.

Granted, there are tons of beer choices, and as experience shows, the more you drink, the more picky you become with your beer selection (by this I mean over the course of years, not in one sitting; as a freshman, a great drinking night could very well include nothing but a 24 case of Miller Light). This greater spectrum of beer notwithstanding, the love of hops and barley is and will always remain the great unifier in the world of the bro, whether consumed out of a nice glass at Ruth Chris’ Steakhouse, accompanied by a porterhouse steak, or out of a red plastic cup at a sloppy backyard pool party. When the brews are cold, or the keg is tapped, Ivy league and Big Ten bros alike unite over a drink, remembering the good ole days of skipping class, Frisbee on the quad, and how much weed they smoked at that one party where they were pretty sure that one chick from “Eurotrip” showed up and the rest is a blur.

I was never a bro.

This presented, and still presents several problems for me, too many of which I am prepared to dump on to you, dear reader. I will however say this: I don’t have a problem with the Bro in a philosophical sense; I think the greater devil may care pack mentality is a great bonding mechanism that keeps the grander idea of fraternity is necessary for men. We need other men to talk to about men stuff, to tell us how it is, emotionless and somewhat ill-informed. My issue with the bro is that because I was never one (I was too busy NOT drinking beer, trying to set shit on fire and avoiding a 9:15 French class) I will never fully understand the mentality of what it feels like to have a guy you can call “your Bro,” in the wingman sense. It is in this jealousy that my frustration stems, furthered by my inhabitance of a large city filled with bars and pubs and dives, all of which cause me slight discomfort, mostly because I don’t know how to drink like a big boy. The Bro attitude doesn’t die off once it’s lodges into your being; it gets weak or gets sloppy, but it never dies. Being surrounded by them, even outside of college is my frustration with bros.

I will never be one of them, nor would I want to be, however my frustrated jealousy will always tug at my heart strings, and I will always fall short in understanding them. Therefore, I’ll just stick to my music, and forever live in the past with my bands, while the men around me grow stronger together in their bond as Bros.